I am very glad ‘A Precious Friend’, my little poem dedicated to my lady cat with the Egyptian eyes, has been liked by quite a few people, to the point that they clicked that ‘like’ button and the end of my post became all lit up by the nice, colorful tiny pictures of those happy people! Thank you! It is particularly important to me because it shows some of you do appreciate the simple joys of life that can be told in small but moving ways like that: simple joys that usually no one would call ‘spiritual’, and yet I challenge that, precisely, for too often we are told and we come to believe indeed that Spirituality is only with a big ‘S’, happening through Experiences that also are only with a big ‘E’, away from daily life and all its tiny supposedly insignificant moments. It is not so at all: as long as we will remain able to feel in each moment the hidden – or obvious – beauty that is there, just waiting to be seen, we will remain alive and well inside. This is why I’m so grateful to Nina for having posted again and again photos of the flowers of her garden in their exquisite May blooming; and once, the pictures she was sharing were of flowers made even more beautiful by the drops of rain that were on them! I loved it!… Looking at those flowers with the raindrops on them immediately reminded me of the second very sharp memory I have of a moment in my childhood that was actually a spiritual experience; the first such moment I already told about in that post a few months back about Lord Shiva and the full moon on his sacred Hill of Arunachala, not very far away in the city of Thiruvanamalai: it was thanks to a full moon night that I had for the first time united spontaneously with the bright, ethereal, silent vastness of the Infinite, suddenly felt in that strangely lit nocturnal unlimited darkness. The second spiritual experience I got happened in fact during the same period of my childhood, when we were still living in that house on top of the hill of Koulouba, overlooking the Niger plain and the city of Bamako. It happened this time in full day light, and with other people around; as every school day of the week, early in the morning my elder sister and I were waiting in front of our house, waiting for the car that would take us down the hill to the French Lycee in the city, capital of the then French Sudan (‘Soudan’) now called Mali. In the almost desertic landscape around us, our mother had succeeded, like everywhere we had lived, in growing roses, in this case two great rosebushes, in barils full of rich soil, on each side of the large entrance to the house. As we waited, my eyes wandered towards the rosebush close by; it so happened that there was a gorgeous velvety dark red bloom that had just opened that morning on that rosebush; on the top petal of it there happened to be a single drop of dew still left from the dawn; and it so happened that, just at the precise moment when I looked, a single ray of sun hit like a flash of lightning that dewdrop alone on that gorgeous red rose. And in the miracle of that moment I was hit too, as if by an arrow, right through my heart, by the instant of absolute beauty I had just witnessed. Time and my heart stopped, I stood there transfixed, not anymore a little girl in front of her family’s house, about to go to school, but all of a sudden a nameless, unidentified but eternal Being, fully aware, in the inner intimacy of my heart, of the Secret Reality of Beauty and Absoluteness that lies behind the reality we normally see. And then the car arrived, and I had to turn again into the little girl going to school, but in the car I kept silent, holding that Moment like a Treasure I never wanted to forget. And as you can see, I didn’t. Decades have gone by, the special, exquisite pain of this Absolute Beauty I experienced in that instant is still there in the depths of me, like a Gem… but totally alive. It was, it is a Soul Moment, for ever part of the true I that I am, and am becoming again consciously in this process of Evolution.

Besides the pictures your skill may take, the sheer reality of those blooms in your garden, the loe you have given them and the joy they have given you have been a spiritual experience for you too, again and again, this is what I wanted also to point out in this post…. You have all that goodness and love in you that you take for granted; and even all of your ranting against the present societies’ injustices and other wrongs come only from an innate sense of how things should be, in a better world. All of it is the result of the spirit’s presence in you, that you still have contact with without knowing what it is. These feelings, this love of flowers, this aspiration for a better world, are precious and more important than you would think: they are the growing seeds of your Inner Garden as well as the outer one.

Yes, you are right, all this is true, it is definitely part of the truth as it is for the time being. But one doesn’t need to take a reductionist attitude and affirm this is all there is to it. Even as a simple hobbit one can let one’s heart open up to Gandalf’s words and influence and get his inner help, and by loving the Elves one can gradually become like them, as Frodo did, or become a better hobbit, as Sam did, and Merry and Pippin. The ‘simple’ friendship between the four of them is love too, of course, and is what motivated those three friends of Frodo to follow him even on this most crazy Quest he accepted to take up for the love of the Shire and of Middle-earth. Love is the true motor all around, and it is at the same time what makes us grow, and the world change for the better. Isn’t this Deepest Secret simple enough, even for hobbits?

CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

Conscious Evolution is for you and me. It is for the whole planet. It is the Next Step which is simply the logical, to be expected continuation of all that Evolution has already made happen upon this little Earth over the eons past.
The difference is that now the human species is there, and we human beings can consciously participate in our own gradual transformation into a more evolved species.
Any progress in that direction, by any of us, will help accelerate the overall progress for the whole Earth and all its inhabitants.
It is happening. Will you help?

‘In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow…’

'In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternal's power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.'